1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate to computerized medical diagnostic systems. More specifically, embodiments of the present invention relate to a computerized system for time-based diagnosis of a patient""s complaint by use of dynamic data structures.
2. Description of the Related Technology
Health care costs currently represent a significant portion of the United States Gross National Product and are rising faster than any other component of the Consumer Price Index. Moreover, usually because of an inability to pay for medical services, many people are deprived of access to even the most basic medical care and information.
Many people delay in obtaining, or are prevented from seeking, medical attention because of cost, time constraints, or inconvenience. If the public had universal, unrestricted, and easy access to medical information, many diseases could be prevented. Likewise, the early detection and treatment of numerous diseases could keep many patients from reaching the advanced stages of illness, the treatment of which is a significant part of the financial burden attributed to our nation""s health care system. It is obvious that the United States is facing health-related issues of enormous proportions and that present solutions are not robust.
Previous attempts at tackling the health care problem have involved various forms of automation. Some of these attempts have been in the form of a dial-in library of answers to medical questions. Other attempts have targeted providing doctors with computerized aids for use during a patient examination. These methods involve static procedures or algorithms. What is desired is an automated way of providing to a patient medical advice and diagnosis that is quick, efficient and accurate. Such a medical advice system should be modular to allow expansion for new types of medical problems or methods of detection.
One way of conducting an interview of a patient includes medical diagnostic scripts. What is needed is an efficient method of representing the medical knowledge of experts in their specialties in a script format. The scripts should utilize dynamic structures to quickly and efficiently reach a diagnosis of the patient.
List-Based Processing is a method of diagnosing diseases that works by arranging diseases, symptoms, and questions into a set of nested Disease, Symptom, and Question (DSQ) lists in such a way that the lists can be processed to generate a dialogue with a patient. Each question to the patient generates one of a set of defined responses, and each response generates one of a set of defined questions. This establishes a dialogue that elicits symptoms from the patient. The symptoms are processed and weighted to rule diseases in or out. The set of ruled-in diseases establishes the diagnosis. A List-Based Processing system organizes medical knowledge into formal, structured lists or arrays, and then applies a special algorithm to those lists to automatically select the next question. The responses to the questions lead to more questions and ultimately to a diagnosis.
In one embodiment of the invention, there is a system for performing an automated diagnostic session with a patient, comprising a plurality of disease scripts, each script being associated with a disease, a patient medical history configured to store medical information specific to a patient, a script router configured to select a set of disease scripts to be considered for diagnosis based on the patient medical history, and a script engine operating on a computer and configured to execute a disease script associated with a selected one of the set of disease scripts and collect additional medical information from the execution of the disease script, wherein the script router automatically changes the set of disease scripts to be further considered for diagnosis based on the patient medical history and the collected medical information.
In another embodiment of the invention, there is a computerized diagnostic system, comprising a list of diseases, each disease associated with a list of symptoms, and each symptom associated with a list of questions; and a script engine operating on a computer and configured to repetitively ask questions to elicit responses, the responses establishing symptoms, each established symptom contributing a weight to an accumulated total weight for a disease, and determine whether the accumulated total weight for a disease reaches or passes a threshold so as to declare a diagnosis.